Temple Mount Geography Confounds New York Times

A New York Times news article about preparations for President Donald Trump’s visit to Jerusalem included this sentence about the Western Wall: “The wall lies underneath the Al Aqsa Mosque, or Temple Mount, which is one of the holiest sites in Islam.”

This is inaccurate in at least two ways.

First, it gets the basic physical/spatial geography of the site wrong. The Western Wall is not “underneath the Al Aqsa Mosque.” Any aerial photograph of the city will confirm that, as would a visit there. The mosque hugs the southern end of the Temple Mount, while the Western Wall is a western retaining wall. There’s some considerable distance between the westernmost wall of the mosque and the top of the Western Wall.

Second, the reference to “the Al Aqsa Mosque, or Temple Mount.” The Al Aqsa Mosque and the Temple Mount are two different things. Muslims call the Temple Mount the Haram al-Sharif or Noble Sanctuary, which may have been what the Times was trying to say.

It’s not the first time, by any means, that the Times has stumbled in describing the site. A 2015 Times article about the Temple Mount generated both an editor’s note and a correction, as did another Times article on the topic later the same year.

The Times may want to be careful with this one. The phony Arab charge that Jews are undermining the foundation of the mosque has led to violence in the past.

Maybe the Arabs are trying to claim the entire plaza atop the Temple Mount as the “Al Aqsa Mosque” as a way of bolstering their claims there. But there’s no good reason for the Times to play along with that land grab.

” . . . Any aerial view. . .” True, but any picture taken from the ground would indeed sow the wall is “below” the mosque and temple mount. While “underneath” is perhaps the wrong word, the wall is technically UNDER/below the mosque. Directly underneath? No. Lower than? Yes.

Notwithstanding the Times’ leftwing, anti-semitic stance, and perhaps their motives in writing this article, the description is not totally inaccurate.

“The phony Arab charge that Jews are undermining the foundation of the mosque has led to violence in the past.”

It is a 100% provable fact that some groups like: The Temple Institute; The Temple Mount Faithful; Honenu and people like: Chaim Richman, Israel Ariel, Dov Lior, Gershon Salomon, Yehuda Glick, Uri Ariel, Miri Regev, Tzipi Hotovely and many more in Israel and other countries do want to demolish the Golden Dome and Al Aqsa Mosque ASAP, so they can build their ersatz copy-paste “Third Temple”.

Thus the claim is not phony.

The editors of Matsav should respect the truth.

“Zion shall be redeemed with judgment, and her converts with righteousness.”